Computer systems are currently in wide use. Some computer systems use remotely located services to accomplish a variety of different things. The remotely located services, for instance, can provide remote data storage for a client.
A cloud service provider that provides such a service generally stores customer data remotely from the premises of the customer and provides one or more services relative to the data. Examples of such cloud services include remote file storage and sharing, electronic mail, hosted applications, etc.
For many customers of the cloud services, such as corporations or other organizations, sensitive and/or confidential information may be stored remotely from the corporation's physical facility. Thus, for some customers of the cloud service, it is important that access to any of the customer's data be strictly controlled. For instance, it may be that customers of cloud services wish to have visibility into actions taken on their content, and wish to have control over access to their content in the cloud, in order to trust the cloud service provider.
In addition, it can be difficult for some organizations that use cloud services to trust that, when a client asks for data to be deleted from the storage system (which is hosted by a third party), it is actually going to be deleted from both hard drive and backup systems within the third party's storage system. On some systems, orphan copies of the data may remain for unknown periods of time, without the knowledge of the client. This data can be compromised when the third party storage system is subjected to surreptitious attack.
Further, users of cloud storage services often wish to verify that data is properly written. This can be quite difficult, and can often consume local storage resources, such as local caching of data.
The discussion above is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.